October 26, 2007

One of my favorite spoken word records is this 1970 public service disc produced by Western Electric for libraries and schools (an excerpt was featured on the 2003 run of 365 Days). Essentially a long essay on how American society deals with Ebonics, The Dialect of the Black American is fairly radical in its message...and very entertaining in its presentation. That one of America's biggest companies produced such a document is testament to how liberal the country had become. Decades of agitation from Labor, the Civil Rights Movement, and the New Left had brought the country to its most enlightened state since anarchists, socialists, Wobblies, and labor forced FDR into the New Deal. Two years after this record's release, the Conservative Rollback, ushered in by the election of Richard Nixon, had begun, bringing us to the mess we are in today. The thought of Citigroup, Exxon Mobil, or Walmart-Stores producing anything like The Dialect... - either in style or content - is nothing less than absurd.

Message aside, The Dialect of the Black American would be just another spoken word record if not for the presentation. Narrator (I assume) Paul K. Winston has the right voice for this record. His rich tone dashes from Standard American English to Ebonics without pause. The writing is good. And the record is funny. Some of the humor is unintended, I'm sure; however, listen to the end of the last track and you know that the writers were laughing as they came up with it. Top a great record off with a fantastic sleeve and here is one of the best spoken word records ever released.

Comments

I think one small flaw in your theory that 1970 was some sort of high-water mark for liberalism, followed by the "the Conservative Rollback, ushered in by the election of Richard Nixon", is that Nixon had been President for 2 years at that point & was re-elected in 1972.

What surprises me is that "Western Electric" produced this record.
For those who never heard of Western Electric, it was the manufacturing arm of AT&T before the breakup (demise) in 1984.
I worked for Western Electric for 17 years and had to learn " Ebonics" as the company hired many "people of color" in it's work force as a result of the government's EEOC (and tax credits for hiring minorities).
Maybe AT&T felt threatened by Ebonics coming into their "Blue Chip" board rooms as well, and decided to educate these "peoples"!

I completely agree with the analysis that liberalism reached a high point in the 1970's, and that there was a rollback afterwards. Nixon was the early beginning of the rollback, but honestly, Nixon was much more liberal than the other Republican presidents who came after him (except for Gerald Ford). Just one example - the Nixon administration vigorously pursued environmental legislation, which recent Republican presidents have been trying to reverse.

Yes, Nixon was re-elected in 1972, and then he resigned in 1974 (I'll never forget where I was on that day). Also, if you recall, there was another Democratic president named Jimmy Carter from 1976-1980, who was also quite liberal (can you imagine amnesty for draft dodgers today?). So, I'd have to say that liberalism had started to level off in 1970, and that the rollback started in earnest in 1980 when Reagan was elected.

When Reagan was campaigning, it used to floor me when he would say things like "liberals have been running the government agenda for the past 20 years" - I figured he must have slept through the Nixon-Ford administrations.